New 22Cans CEO Talks About His Plans for the Company

Peter Molyneux's game studio, 22Cans, has been in a lot of hot water since the release of it's game, Godus. The Kickstarter for Godus launched back in 2013, touting an immense amount of features to a God Simulation game. Later on during development, a man named Bryan Henderson won a prize for his innovation to the game, though it's unclear on how the innovation or the prize would work.

As the game's features seemed more and more unlikely to make an appearance, along with the confusion at the prize for Mr. Henderson, the game's player reviews on Steam Early-Access became very negative. What became one of the final nails in the coffin was an admission by Lead Designer Konrad Naszynski that 22Cans probably won't be able to deliver on everything it promised in the very successful 2013 Kickstarter. Ultimately, this culminated in an interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun, where Peter Molyneux was asked if he was "a pathological liar", along with other hard-hitting questions, that seemed to show the business flaws in 22Cans and Molyneux. After the interview, Molyneux swore off interviews, and has made pretty good on that promise.

"It was a good opportunity to work with someone who was so passionate about games," Philips said, talking about his feelings when he was offered the opportunity to be the CEO of 22Cans, "And so clever with design, which is the thing I'd been missing for so many years. I love the business side of games, but I found myself being excited in a way I hadn't felt in 20 years."

"There's nothing to calculate [the prize] on," the CEO said in regards to the Bryan Henderson situation, "You can't say, let's put a pound a day away for Bryan, or ten pounds. There's no financial concept of what this God of Gods thing is, and that's what we need to sort out," he said. "That's not to say there isn't an idea of what maybe it should be. But I categorically don't want to just buy Bryan off. I don't want to go, we're really sorry, here you go, and we really mean it. No actually, let's try do the right thing. It's so difficult to try and convey I just want to do the right thing."